Jeff Allen wrote:
I speculate this all goes back to some pre-iteration version of FORmula TRANslation, where to its inventors '=' was definition and these really were "statements" in the normal sense of stating a truth.
Yeah, also the earliest FORTRAN didn't even *have* comparison operators. A conditional branch was something like IF (X-Y) 10, 20, 30 going three different ways depending on whether X-Y was negative, zero or positive. Then when comparison operators were added, a lot of people didn't have "<" and ">" characters available to them, so FORTRAN used ".EQ.", ".LT.", ".GT." etc. instead. We're actually quite spoiled with our "==" operator! -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
